Why is my computer hot?
06/07/10 Filed in: Hardware
Hi Scotty,
My daughter is heading out this fall to college. Her school supports PC's and MAC's. SO she wants to stick with a MAC. I have a Macbook Pro and she currently uses a IMac desktop. What laptop do you recommend for her? If you think it is adequate, I would rather go with the cheaper MacBook. However do you think the i5 technology is far superior to the 2 Duo? Nice but not necessary? Or foolish not to take advantage because the other will be obsolete before we know it?
Also for back up for her at college, assuming she does not want to mess with time capsule etc... would a mobile me account provide that back up she will need? (Sorry I am still a verizon customer and am not really familiar with the mobile me accounts etc. since I do not have a iphone
Hope the full time gig is going well.
_________
Congrats on sending the child to college! A day for which I dream. I standard macbook will be plenty. The more powerful Macbook Pro line has more ports and a faster graphics card, faster processor...but for general college work the entry macbook will be very good. She doesn’t need all the other stuff at this point in her computer life yet. The i5 vs. Core 2 Duo is also not a deal breaker either. You must keep in mind that kids in college often leave with a beautiful computer and come back with a destroyed one. So I would think twice before you invest even more money into a nicer computer. Dorm rooms are not nice to computers.
Backup is absolutely essential. While she doesn’t need a dedicated wireless router with a backup drive (Time Capsule) she does need a backup strategy. I recommend she get a seperate hard drive and connect it every day or so. All macs have a program called Time Machine that will do a great job of saving her data in case of an emergency. You could also consider a cloud based service like Mozey or Carbonite but generally I’d rather have it in my hands. There are also limitations to those services. I prefer a good old fashioned external drive. Now the drawback to this is that if there was a theft in the dorm room, then she could lose both the computer and the back up. So in a perfect world you’d want 2 drives. One that lives in the room and another that only comes in to the room every couple of months or so. MobileMe is not the solution for online backup. So I can’t really recommend that service for that need. It’s really more for syncing contacts, calendars, creating web pages, etc... Not for storing large amounts of data.
It does come with 20 gigs of offsite storage although data would have to be manually added to the mobileme cloud storage called “iDisk”. Overall, however, it’s very slow. So I really prefer a local good old fashioned hard drive. (or two)
My daughter is heading out this fall to college. Her school supports PC's and MAC's. SO she wants to stick with a MAC. I have a Macbook Pro and she currently uses a IMac desktop. What laptop do you recommend for her? If you think it is adequate, I would rather go with the cheaper MacBook. However do you think the i5 technology is far superior to the 2 Duo? Nice but not necessary? Or foolish not to take advantage because the other will be obsolete before we know it?
Also for back up for her at college, assuming she does not want to mess with time capsule etc... would a mobile me account provide that back up she will need? (Sorry I am still a verizon customer and am not really familiar with the mobile me accounts etc. since I do not have a iphone
Hope the full time gig is going well.
_________
Congrats on sending the child to college! A day for which I dream. I standard macbook will be plenty. The more powerful Macbook Pro line has more ports and a faster graphics card, faster processor...but for general college work the entry macbook will be very good. She doesn’t need all the other stuff at this point in her computer life yet. The i5 vs. Core 2 Duo is also not a deal breaker either. You must keep in mind that kids in college often leave with a beautiful computer and come back with a destroyed one. So I would think twice before you invest even more money into a nicer computer. Dorm rooms are not nice to computers.
Backup is absolutely essential. While she doesn’t need a dedicated wireless router with a backup drive (Time Capsule) she does need a backup strategy. I recommend she get a seperate hard drive and connect it every day or so. All macs have a program called Time Machine that will do a great job of saving her data in case of an emergency. You could also consider a cloud based service like Mozey or Carbonite but generally I’d rather have it in my hands. There are also limitations to those services. I prefer a good old fashioned external drive. Now the drawback to this is that if there was a theft in the dorm room, then she could lose both the computer and the back up. So in a perfect world you’d want 2 drives. One that lives in the room and another that only comes in to the room every couple of months or so. MobileMe is not the solution for online backup. So I can’t really recommend that service for that need. It’s really more for syncing contacts, calendars, creating web pages, etc... Not for storing large amounts of data.
It does come with 20 gigs of offsite storage although data would have to be manually added to the mobileme cloud storage called “iDisk”. Overall, however, it’s very slow. So I really prefer a local good old fashioned hard drive. (or two)
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